Moodle 3.7 has landed! The core development team have been busy at HQ for the past 6 months, working toward this release. Naturally, being an open source project, it would be remiss not to recognise the contributions of the Moodle Community, including HQ, partners, non-core developers, customers and users.
As we’ve come to expect, there’s a number of new features, enhancements to existing features, bug fixes and security patches. There’s a continued priority on overall accessibility. The Boost theme and forums are the main benefactors in this particular release.
Headline features for Moodle 3.7 include:
Forum re-architectured and new features
New features include in-page posting of a reply and new discussion, the ability to reply privately to a post, starring and sorting of discussions and the ability to manually lock discussions.
Advancing Learning Analytics
Learning Analytics capabilities have expanded and now include the ability to create, delete, import and export Learning Analytics models, a feature to evaluate imported models using the data on your site, new predictions targets, and a new model to generate insights as reminders of upcoming activities that are due.
Building on Moodle Messaging
Additional messaging features and improve overall usability with the introduction of: muting of conversation notifications, group messaging notifications and an email digest of new messages, a capability to allow users to delete a message for all users, a personal space where you can keep useful messages, notes and links, new site settings pages that combine all messaging related settings centrally and more!
Open Badges 2.0 and Badgr Backpack
Moodle 3.7 improves its support for Open Badges 2.0, allowing you to connect and exchange badges with the Badgr platform. This is an important advancement because Mozilla has announced it will retire the Mozilla Backpack and help users migrate to the open Badgr platform.
LTI 1.3 and Advantage
The latest iteration of the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard created by the IMS Global Learning Consortium and offers improved security. It facilitates sharing and linking of content and resources between learning platforms.
Theme changes
From now on, Moodle default themes are based on Bootstrap 4, which will allow a more standard approach to all Moodle theme and content development. The Classic theme has been introduced as a replacement for the Clean theme. Classic provides an upgrade pathway for those sites that are using a Clean-based theme and prefer the 3 column layout and traditional navigation block.
Custom course fields
It is now possible to add custom fields to your courses to store and display additional information that is important for your site’s users.
For more information, please refer to Moodle 3.7 What’s New guide, Moodle 3.7 Features page and Moodle 3.7 Release Notes. As per usual, Moodle can be downloaded from the official Moodle Download page.
If you’d like to discuss your requirement or need further assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to Moodle Partner, My Learning Space.